3 Simple Rules for Contributing in Team Meetings

Are your team behaving the way you want them to in team meetings? Are they either too silent or too dominant? The reason they are either too silent or too dominant is because you haven’t framed how you want them to behave in the meeting. There’s a really simple way to do this with three simple rules that will help you get better team meetings, have the silent people speak up and the dominant people sit back. I’m going to share the three simple rules with you so that you can use them in your team meetings.

Frame Your Team Meetings

I spent a lot of time in groups, coaching leaders and working with leadership teams. And over time, I watched the impact of the way I frame a team meeting and its impact on the result I get at the end of the session. And I realised that if you don’t frame the way you want people to behave, they’ll just do what they typically did at school. Which is either speak too much or not speak at all.

And that’s not what you want, because you want equal contribution from your team. And you want engagement on your strategy and where you want to get to. So what I’ve developed is a way of framing up how I want people to contribute when they’re in a group situation. I use three simple rules to do it.

1. I ask them to be really short and concise. It’s two to three sentences if you want to contribute an idea. So we don’t want too many war stories for them to go on too long. And nor do we want it to be so short that it’s kind of awkward, because they haven’t told the whole story. If you get this right, everyone can give an idea. But it doesn’t go on too long.
2. You want to frame for people telling the truth. The challenge here is that people hold back in meetings. They generalise, they don’t really tell it as it is. They don’t talk about the real problems. And so your meetings have no drama, no tension. They’re boring and no one wants to attend.
3. If you frame them for telling the truth in a constructive way, which is the third point, then you get to the real nubs of the issues. And actually people start to want to attend again.

So the way I actually would frame this is to say,

“Hey, we could talk about stuff that isn’t real or we could talk about things that we really care about. So why don’t we just tell the truth about what’s actually going on and have a conversation about that.”

The third one is constructive. The problems here, people love to talk about and blame other people when things go wrong. They love to blame other departments and other people that we know, rather than focusing on things that the team is in control of. The way I frame this up is,

“I want us to be constructive. I don’t want us to be a victim. I want us to talk about things that we can control and that we can impact.”

Summary

In team meetings often what we don’t do is, we don’t frame up how we want people to behave. So people default back to their standard style. And that can be distracting for all your team members, and they don’t want to attend. Three simple rules for you to frame up how you want your team meetings to roll.

• First one is, keep it short. Two or three sentences.
• Second is, tell the truth. Be honest.
• And the third is, don’t be a victim. Make your contributions constructive.

What I would love you to do is to take these three ideas and either talk your team through them, and frame up your meeting. Or come up with your own three for how you want to frame up your team meetings.

Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch

If you want to help with your leadership team and your leadership team meetings and how to structure these, and how to create the right environment, book in a time to talk to me and let’s see if we’re the right fit to work together. I hope this is improving your team meetings and you have a much better time. Talk to you next time on The Reason & The Road.